In the field of this invention it is known that electronic messages such as e-mail and newsletters, because of their ease of use (and particularly the ease which they may be addressed to multiple addressees) are sent in wide proliferation and often indiscriminately.
Consequently, electronic message recipients may receive a lot of redundant information in electronic newsletters and e-mail. Recipients today spend much time on reading mails where a major or minor part is without any relevance to them and their job role. Also, if an author wants to distribute e-mail or newsletters to specific target groups the author is often forced to produce various versions of a message—one to each target group—to be able to show respectively only the information that might be of interest to each specific target group.
U.S. Pat. No. 5,819,269 describes a dynamic sorting of (for example) newsgroup postings received by a client based on categories of posting. However, this known sorting allows only for any individual message to be blocked or allowed in its entirety.
Similarly, U.S. Pat. No. 5,619,648 describes filtering of (for example) e-mail at a client to remove junk mail; U.S. Pat. No. 5,999,932 describes a solution where an e-mail as a whole is marked with a kind of status code for filtering; and U.S. Pat. No. 5,884,033 describes filtering Internet material such as e-mail. However, again, in all of these known descriptions filtering is achieved only by blocking or allowing an individual e-mail as a whole.
Clearly, there is a need for a recipient to be able to receive only that part or those parts of an electronic message having relevance to the recipient. Similarly there is a need for an author to be able to produce a reduced number of different versions of a message, where the message is to be sent to different recipients who may be interested in different parts of the message.
A need therefore exists for a system and method for tailoring of electronic messages wherein the above-mentioned disadvantages may be alleviated.